Previously on TheAngryPen:

09-12-2000 2 Parties

08-18-2000 Al’s Acceptance

08-10-2000 Gore’s Choice

08-03-2000 The American Dream

07-20-2000 History and Hollywood

07-13-2000 40 Acres and a Mule

07-06-2000 The God We Trust

06-29-2000 Lyrical Assault

06-15-2000 Bank Fees

06-07-2000 A Mixture Often of Incongruous Elements

05-24-2000 Social Security

05-17-2000 Governmental Good Intentions

05-10-2000 Johnny Reb and Disgusting Fatbodies

05-03-2000 Low Fidelity

04-26-2000 Jackboots and Black Helicopters

04-19-2000 Movie Trailers

04-12-2000 All Things Cuban

04-05-2000 Censorship

03-29-2000 Juries and Tobacco

03-22-2000 Several Things

03-15-2000 Gore the Reformer

03-08-2000 Mission to Mars

03-08-2000 Super Tuesday

03-03-2000 Little Johnny Murderer

03-01-2000 Bob Jones

02-23-2000 The Christian Coalition

02-16-2000 Valentine's Day

02-09-2000 Short-Sighted Political Parties

02-02-2000 Mosh Pits

01-12-2000 Al Gore's Personality

11-17-1999 Playboy

09-02-1999 The Demise of Heavy Metal

	TheAngryPen vs. Mission to Mars

As I consider the prospect of paying eight dollars to sleep through Mission to Mars this Friday night, I'm really starting to miss the golden age of the Hollywood auteur. This happens to me every now and then, and most often on Sunday mornings. You know the scene. You wake up, having spent two hours of the previous Saturday night, two hours you'll never, ever get back, suffering through the latest studio programmer, to a feeling of deep disappointment that hangs on you like the stale, hotdog water taste of a bad hangover. It's times like these when I long for the Gunslinger days of Hollywood in the Sixties and Seventies.

I picture guys like Coppola, Lucas, and Scorsese, smoothly talking rich businessmen out of their millions while they ran all around the world doing whatever the hell they wanted to do with their Panaflexes. It must've been a blast to be in Hollywood in those Wild West days. Must've been amazing to see passionate artists making films they believed in, and in which they were emotionally invested. Imagine that! Oh how times have changed.

Hard to tell exactly when the paradigm shifted. But things haven't worked that way for long time. Well, rarely anyway. Hollywood has become a product. And ninety-nine percent of the Hollywood product you're likely to see in the next two years is, right now, even as you read this, languishing on something the studios call their "development slate." This means that the studios and their minions are busy as beavers, developing a list of movie projects they think you might, under the right conditions, want to see at some point in the future. It may be a script, but quite often, a project is just a one-line pitch, the rights to a book, article, or true-life story, or even the remake rights to an idea that was already made into a movie years ago, sometimes multiple times. A typical "project in development" resembles a Mr. Potato Head. If the studio can find the right elements to plug in (i.e. writer, director, or actor), well then maybe, possibly, somewhere down the line, we might get a good movie out of the deal.

Actually, that last bit isn't quite accurate. I'd be willing to bet that any studio executive worth their salt would very quickly sacrifice the word "good" in that sentence for the opportunity to replace it with "profitable." But maybe that's another column.

At any rate, what this burgeoning process has done is turn the feature film director into a hired-gun, a modern-day Ronin endlessly searching for a commercially-viable "Open Directing Assignment" that they can plug themselves into. A new master to serve... business rather than art.

Movie-making here at the turn of the millennium often resembles an adult version of Pokemon, with executives, agents, and producers all sitting around trading "packages" of these plug-in-artists to each other over sushi lunches they will later expense, and in the process creating a seemingly endless series of middleman choke-points through which every idea, artist, new story point, and rewrite must pass before the prospective film can move on to the next step in the process. Sucks huh? Well, there's a reason it's called Development Hell.

So where, exactly, do directors fit into this "packaging" equation? Well, while it used to be that a director was the one thing a movie could not be developed without; nowadays, the director is often the last element to be "plugged in." The more powerful directors in Hollywood could change all this at any time, of course, but in these "the bottom line is everything" times, most directors are running scared, and they have allowed the business side of Hollywood to frighten them into submission.

Brian De Palma certainly wasn't the first to sell out, and he likely won't be the last. Once considered a part of the upper echelon of film auteurs, De Palma debuts this weekend with yet another cookie-cutter, effects-laden studio schlock-fest. His latest disasterpiece Mission To Mars opens on Friday and, please believe The Pen when he tells you that, if you are planning to see this film, start boiling the hotdogs now. De Palma used to trust himself enough to come up with an idea and develop it from genesis all the way to theatre release. His first film Carrie was, for a time, considered the horror genre's standard-bearer. But it's been a tough couple of decades for the once-proud filmmaker, and now De Palma is just another hired gun. Just another middle-of-the-road hack like Peter Hyams (Relic, End of Days), whose films De Palma's are beginning to resemble... The Pen shudders. So if you intend to plunk down your eight bucks this weekend for M2M, consider yourself forewarned.

But enough about the hacks. Let's look on the bright side. Is the age of the auteur really dead and gone? Not at all. In fact, I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it may be on the mend.

Hollywood, take note. The gunslingers are out there. Couple years ago, Jim Cameron said, "Hey guys, I think I can make a successful two hundred million dollar romance set aboard the doomed Titanic." Hollywood, and the world, let out a collective guffaw, telling him he was nuts, that it would never work. Well, Jim took a couple puffs off his cheroot, stood up, drew his Colt Westerner, and fired from the hip, saying, "I'll take that bet!" A billion and a half dollars, eleven Oscars, and countless tear-soaked hankies later, I'd say he's made his point.

Which is, I think, exactly this: the most profitable, most inventive, most entertaining movies of the last few years (and no, those three words do not have to be mutually exclusive, Mr. Studio Executive), Titanic, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, There's Something About Mary, and even the new Star Wars installment, have all been made by artists who were inspired by a story that they felt needed to be told, and who stuck with that story to the bitter end. They sold the idea, or they wrote the script, or they found the cast (and quite often a good bit of the money to finance the project as well), and they went off to make their baby, all the while openly flaunting the vaunted studio development process.

This should put the business side of Hollywood on notice. We may not need you guys anymore. Even those of us with only the most rudimentary knowledge of business theory understand the concept of "getting rid of the middle-man." And that's what guys like Cameron, The Farrellys, Shyamalan, and the Wachowski Brothers, in the grand tradition of the seventies auteurs who came before them, remind us of every time they bring us into the local multiplex in record numbers.

Something I'm confident will not happen with Mission to Mars.